On the 50th Anniversary of JFK's Assassination, Let's Examine His True Legacy

As the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination
grows near, the media, always suckers for celebrity, will likely provide
saturation coverage of the tragic killing and the emotion-invoking
funeral. The American public, also suckers for presidential charisma,
consistently rate magnetic presidents, such as Kennedy and Ronald
Reagan, much higher than the historians who study them in-depth.

The political parties assist in peddling this hype because
perpetuating myths of historic "giants" helps to win today's elections.
Republicans regularly try to compare themselves to an idealized notion
of Reagan that didn't even come close to existing. The same is true of
Democrats with JFK. But since the anniversary of Kennedy's death is the
one that is upon us, let's concentrate on why he did not exemplify the
best characteristics of a liberal and was actually a very bad president.

Liberals sometimes idealize JFK for his transformational activities
in civil rights, the Peace Corps, and committing the country to sending
humans to the moon within the decade. Yet JFK wanted to compete
aggressively with the Soviet Union and saw all of the above issues
largely as they related to the Cold War. He believed bad publicity
surrounding segregation and race-related violence in the United States
was helping to lose the propaganda war against the Soviet Union in the
developing world. He believed the Peace Corps program would win back
some of that lost public relations ground in those parts of the globe.
Kennedy didn't care about space exploration, but instead viewed the moon
program through the lens U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War.

Of all Cold War presidents, JFK and Reagan were the most hawkish and
caused unnecessary crises with the USSR that almost resulted in nuclear
war. Kennedy has been praised for his restrained resolve during the
Cuban Missile Crisis, thus preventing a nuclear war between the
superpowers. Yet JFK's dangerous policy toward Cuba caused the crisis
in the first place and his rash actions once Soviet missiles in Cuba
were suspected almost resulted in nuclear Armageddon.

In 1961, obsessed with eliminating the communist government in Cuba,
JFK approved an idiotic CIA plan to not so secretly train and launch an
invasion force of Cuban exiles that was intended to result in Fidel
Castro's overthrow. After the invasion's ignominious failure and
exposure and Soviet detection of unbelievable further attempts by the
Kennedy administration to assassinate Castro, the Soviets decided to
install nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter another U.S. invasion. Also,
the Soviets wanted to give the United States "a taste of its own
medicine," since U.S. nuclear missiles had been installed near the
Soviet Union in Turkey and Italy.

Before JFK was even sure that Soviet missiles were being installed in
Cuba, he said publicly in mid-September 1962 that "if Cuba should
possess a capacity to carry out offensive actions against the United
States...the United States would act." Kennedy and his defense
secretary, Robert McNamara, later admitted that Soviet missiles in Cuba
would not have altered the strategic nuclear balance, and JFK confessed
that if he had not made the prior public promise, he would not have had
to do anything in response to the Soviet missiles in Cuba. He could
have ignored the entire matter--after all, the Soviet missiles in Cuba
did not alter the substantial U.S. nuclear advantage--or he could have
handled the matter through private diplomatic channels, avoiding the
provocative naval blockade of Cuba (considered by international norms as
an act of war) and public nuclear show down between the superpowers.

One could even argue that after all the facts were uncovered,
Khrushchev had gotten the better of Kennedy in the crisis. Publicly,
JFK had traded the elimination of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba in
return for a pledge by the United States not to invade Cuba. So as not
to embarrass Turkey, Kennedy only secretly agreed to withdraw U.S.
missiles from that country. Yet public humiliation of the moderate
Khrushchev was a major factor in his later ouster and replacement by
Soviet hardliners, who, to avoid future humiliation at the hands of
America, conducted a massive military build up and arms race with the
United States that eventually did end U.S. nuclear superiority.

Unnerved by the crisis, JFK did sign a partial nuclear test ban, which
only permitted the future underground testing of nuclear weapons; but
this limited treaty paled in comparison to the reckless Kennedy's almost
stumbling into a nuclear World War III for no valid reason. The
potential needless destruction of much of human civilization should
alone qualify JFK as being one of the worst presidents in U.S. history.

Kennedy acolytes argue that he had decided Vietnam was a quagmire
and, before his death, had ordered that 1,000 U.S. soldiers be
withdrawn. However, he previously had drastically ballooned the number
of U.S. advisors from 900 during the Eisenhower administration to
16,000, thus significantly deepening U.S. involvement in the conflict.
Also, JFK lost the war before his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, ever
escalated it--by tacitly approving the ouster of South Vietnamese
President Ngo Dinh Diem, which left a political leadership vacuum that
is critical in counterinsurgency war and for which only U.S. combat
forces could provide an inadequate substitute.

Domestically, unlike his successor, JFK had no skills to get his
stalled legislative program through Congress, including his reluctantly
put forth Civil Rights Act. Kennedy, always fearful of losing support
from the conservative southern wing of his party, constantly tried to
rein in, not promote, the civil rights movement's agenda, including
attempting to discourage Martin Luther King from his now-famous "March
on Washington and "I have a dream" speech in August 1963. The less
charismatic LBJ, Kennedy's vice president and successor, should really
be the hero of the civil rights movement, not JFK--advising Kennedy to
make civil rights a moral cause and then using JFK's martyrdom and his
own legislative skills to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 at a major cost to his party in southern white
support.

In short, JFK hardly represented the best aspects of liberalism,
unnecessarily endangered not only the American people but the entire
world with nuclear war, and was a very bad president.